Hewlett-Packard has turned heads with the iPaq's sharp display, even though it's not always the cheapest option on the table.

Can sprawling tech colossus Hewlett-Packardwhose offerings range from printers to high-end Unix serversproduce a handheld that's sexy and powerful enough to compete with specialists like Palm and Research in Motion?

You bet, say customers. They like the HP iPaq's high-resolution screen and touch-sensitive features, and its Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system, even if the handhelds aren't always the cheapest products in their class.

For Rich Schaeffer, CIO of St. Clair Hospital in Pittsburgh, the iPaq's "beautiful" screen and attachable bar-code scanner made it the right choice to help doctors and nurses avoid costly medical errors by improving accuracy of prescriptions.

The 331-bed hospital built a bar-code and radio frequency identification (RFID) scanning system using iPaqs, to track medications and other supplies. Tom Ague, the hospital's chief operating officer, estimates that the system prevents more than 5,000 medication errors each year, out of 1.3 million annual doses. That's helped put it in the top 5% of hospitals nationwide for patient safety outcomes, according to HealthGrades, an independent health-care rating company.

At $800 with necessary peripherals, the iPaqs save the company more than $1,000 per device compared with some of the bulkier handhelds it has tried in the past, according to Polanco. "We looked at a lot of devices, and for the price, you couldn't beat it," he says.

Curtis valued the ability to link up to existing Microsoft systems more easily with the iPaq than by using a device with a proprietary operating system, since Windows Mobile uses applications that function similarly to its desktop cousin. That, he says, was more important than paying a little extra. "You can find cheaper device manufacturers," Curtis says. "From our perspective, supporting a device we were already familiar with kind of offset any cost difference with a different hardware supplier."

Brian joined Baseline in March 2006. In addition to previous stints at Inter@ctive Week and The Net Economy, he's written for The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., as well as The Sunday Tribune in Dublin, Ireland. Brian has a B.A. from Bucknell University and a master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.